Cognitive Bias Persecution Complex Junkie Exploits

from As It Were: The Long-Lost Blue-Noted Romance Yarn by Amos Bankhead

Aurorus had regular seminars and events that stretched the greater length of California, from Mendocino to Huntington Beach. I'd reluctantly become enmeshed in the community (and even more reluctantly in the Community) with assurances that my involvement would lead to lucrative connections and golden opportunities. But I'd been driving Rocinante up and down the damn coast just about every weekend, attending seminars and playing gigs, and I was still barely making ends meet.

I was still busking—my preferred mode of performance—and then playing shows and private parties, but with the tech industry booming the cost of living in the Bay Area was out of control, and so I returned to supplementing my income with side hustles. Thus far these had seen me swinging a sledgehammer, lugging luggage, shining shoes, and clowning at kiddie birthday parties; I'd yet to shovel shit or dig ditches or flip burgers or sell socks on a street corner. Years later, doing a stint in Georgia, I'd be amused by a group of men who stationed themselves at the local AutoZone and wrangled neighborhood dogs at large in order to sell them back to their humans for four-dollar ransom payments on Cash App. I wasn't exactly thriving at the time, and for half a day I half-considered joining their ranks, but ultimately opted to pass on that particular opportunity. There were in fact a handful of stray dogs I’d befriended around my place in the shipyards back then; alas, I have never had the head (or the heart) for business, and I'd yet to fully experience the variegated struggles of the working class and poor, and so I settled for a part-time gig filling in at a crappy seafood restaurant on the pier. It is common in the restaurant business for one to start off as a dishwasher or busboy and work their way up, but in my singular manner I began waiting tables and helping out behind the bar and worked my way down the ladder to the bottom rung. Before I knew it, I found myself scraping plates and scrubbing pans and hauling rancid bags of waste to the dumpster out back, covered in grease and reeking of fish.

I've often heard it said that there is dignity in hard work.
I've perhaps just as often been amused by the various sources of this wisdom; more often than not, it isn’t coming from the person pushing a mop or cleaning the toilets.
I figure there's dignity in doing with care whatever one is doing. But then what is one doing, and why? At what cost? To what end?

Perhaps it's a luxury, or indelicate even, to entertain these queries—but the alternative is surely more inimical. Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London gave me salient ideas on this subject at the time, and two decades of toil in filthy, low-wage work (even now, halfway through the third decade of the 21st century, the federal subminimum/tipped minimum wage in several parts of the U.S. remains at $2.13 per hour [!??!!?]) has given me invaluable perspective, in addition to a number of bad habits and headaches. But even back then, with only a cursory familiarity with Marx and theories of alienation/estrangement, I knew the framing of work as virtuous by anyone other than the worker to be a farce, and an iniquitous one at that. I'd spent my whole life seeing people work hard only to add insult to injury (or vice versa), framing their drudgery as noble and de rigueur, resigned to their role in a system predicated upon exploiting them.

On the waterfront one afternoon with Emile, I was busking and he was having a high time chatting up passerby with his exotic and eccentric deportment. Later that day, as we sat with beers upstairs at Vesuvio, he reached into his backpack and extracted a watch, two wallets, and two cell phones, and laid the goods on the table in front of us.

When his father had fallen ill, Emile was forced to drop his university studies to help provide for his family. Unable to find employment that suited him and his unique talents, he apprenticed himself to a professional in Paris' 5th arrondissement, and began working as a pickpocket and petty thief.

It was right around the time I met Calliope Jones that I first remember seeing Carol Reed's Oliver!, and was immediately enamored of the Artful Dodger, Fagin, et al., the rakish outcasts and their picaresque lives, the idea of working these tricky angles to survive the vise of poverty and level the playing field. (However, if I saw the characters as Victorian-era Robin Hood figures, my romantic interpretation not only conveniently ignored the avarice but also dismissed the exploitation and violence within Fagin's organization.)

My family had always struggled; the financial distress and anxiety would often see me shoplifting, and the practice became increasingly compulsory (if refined) over the years. Back in our elementary school days, my friend Murphy was often left by his mother without what he needed or the money to procure it, and so the two of us devised methods of filching provisions from supermarkets or big box stores using simple tricks and misdirection. Back then it served the dual function of providing sustenance we would otherwise be denied and then also supplying the adrenaline rush to which our young bodies had become accustomed with regular traumatic stress at home. Now it sounded just as economical, and I figured that if Emile had reason to explore alternative sources of income whilst living in France, then one living in America had an obligation. They don't call it a survival economy for nothing.

We considered our options and debated more elaborate heists, including banks, but this was a bit too cliché even for us, and I drew the line at knowingly traumatizing others with violence or carrying firearms. A handful of my teenage years had been spent alongside Freddy Rombus, haunting downtown Manzana beneath the cloak of night, quietly perfecting our craft as a curious brand of benign B&E men. We'd reconnoiter by scaling fire escapes or shimmying along ledges on high, crawling across rooftops and scheming to gain non licet entry to proscribed premises. Our escapades were never designed or conducted with intentions beyond enjoying the thrill of getting in and out without being caught (I distinctly remember our ritualized high five which consummated each feat); in addition to the romance of the rooftops, we enjoyed the creativity we committed to each caper, as well as the invariable rush that came with the high stakes. Two of the buildings we'd scouted some years back were now occupied by a real estate firm and a tech startup, which qualified them (in our minds, at least) as thoroughly eligible to be burgled, and then I was also sussing out the particulars for a half-dozen other potential jobs. Despite my convictions, I was still somewhat conflicted about it all—but things were only getting more desperate, and I knew I could make a substantive argument for our contentious undertakings. I agreed to be an accomplice to Emile's pickpocketing and petty thievery, with his assurance that it too would be performed judiciously, and then we agreed to work together on larger takes. We spent afternoons in dark bars and midnight hours in diners, drafting plans for the unarmed banditry of entities from which we could rationalize purloining.

Pickpocketing? Burglary?
Prescription drug prices? Wage theft?

Tomayto, tomahto. When in Rome the U.S.A….

(But we were just doing it to survive, we told ourselves...and in writing this I'm reminded of Steven Cohen, the billionaire hedge fund king and fraudster who presided over one of the largest insider trading scandals in history [and avoided criminal charges], when he responded to being called out for subsequent unscrupulous behavior by claiming he was "just trying to make a living". For it seems a living [or, by extension, survival] is entirely relative to the lives with which we're acquainted, to which we are accustomed...)

Re: Arrest and imprisonment: It seemed preferable to avoid it, but the perverse truth was that this was hardly a substantial deterrent. In fact, we both wondered if it might somehow be a more forthright and reasonable position; 'three-hots-and-a-cot' guaranteed sounds damn good to a great deal of those struggling mightily to manage just that...

...I'm sitting at a Bechstein grand, in the parquet-floored library of a tech mogul, and at one point I unbowed my head and looked around the room at the peacocks milling about the shindig. I was among them—but I was still the help. What poor bastard would be warden of this prison?...

(I was at this point just another in an endless procession of pure souls believing in a way around the darkness, or of the conviction that, if I had to go through it, I'd make it out clean-handed and undefiled. And if I happened to come out with some blood on my hands...well then I'd just wash them clean, for my sins would simply be small-print provisos in the Mephistophelian contract; the deal with the devil would be made with the knowledge that I had him figured, hoodwinked and on his heels...)

But really, how could I live like that?

This was what Hannah asked me as we stood on the Santa Monica pier one evening. She was an international aid worker from Switzerland, on holiday in the States; she'd seen me playing, and then I'd asked her out for ice cream and a walk, which eventually led us to the dark of a corner dive, and then out to the pier as the sun was setting. She was good-natured and pure of heart, and was confounded by my admission, since she'd figured me to be the same. If I hadn't pulled her into the bar and then had seven-too-many, I would have likely kept my mouth shut, but I ended up spilling the beans on our side hustle and then trying to explain, in my terse and tight-lipped manner, the onerous and daedal truth: our lives in America were predicated upon loot; exploitation is our foundational principle and precept; big eyes do not nullify our blindness; and on and on in this daffy vein. Moreover, I said, there was the not-insignificant degree to which my thievery was residual from the (financial) trauma I'd endured throughout childhood…so, ya know, it's not so different from getting fucked up, I told her.

Hannah looked at me for a long beat.

I guess someone like you will always have your reasons, she said.

I looked out at the water and felt the knots in my gut. I was struggling to endorse the allusive commentary on this subject from a Swiss—but then she hadn't said much. And it also happened to be true.

Rationalization was the real affliction.
But then (seeeeee? but SERIOUSLY now...) it all depends on our vantage point; rationalization seen from the other side is reason...so we've all got some cognitive-bias blood on our hands...

(I'm typing this as Israel continues its atrocities against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and pondering the work of Professor Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University, an expert on the conflict and one of the planet's leading political psychologists. Bar Tal's work with Israeli Jews has found that their "consciousness is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanisation of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering". Bar Tal's research also cites a correlation between these findings and a[n entirely understandable, I think] Jewish persecution complex. In other words: hurt people hurt people. And extended to/concerning capitalism: exploitation begets exploitation.)

It was all beginning to feel like too damn much for me to handle—and even though I knew 'the way is THROUGH', it seemed as though I was living beneath a heavy cloud in America; the promise existed in books and music and films but not in the daily life most were apparently content to live...or maybe they just saw—and accepted—the charade for what it was…so then, who was the real sucker here?

The Aurorus seminars were led by Benny's protégé, a tiny caustic woman who lorded over the crowds with New Age shibboleths, until heads nodded in stupefied reverence towards the bodhisattva before them. Benny would often make a cameo on the final day of a seminar and deliver the coup de grâce, which invariably generated a warm ovation and a new herd of bewitched disciples and starry-eyed adherents. I invited Hannah to a seminar in Santa Barbara, and as we lay on the beach after the last evening, she told me that my ratiocination (this was the word she used, a straight-faced backhand I couldn't help but applaud and appreciate) would not absolve me from being the person she knew that I was—but that after today she could also see it from another angle, and conceded that maybe it's all the same racket. Which doesn't let you off the hook, she said.